Use images and codewords to get around keywords blocked on Chinese websites
Thousands of keywords are blocked on Baidu, Sina Weibo etc. You can make life much more difficult for the censors by posting images of blocked keywords as well as finding other ways of describing the same thing. [To do: examples].
Use HTTPS to circumvent keywords blocked on foreign websites
If you use https://www.google.com.hk instead of... more

We have received a lot of good will from many visitors since our launch. Please feel free to contact us if there are any ideas you would like to share. Simply following us on Twitter and sharing our content with your networks is helpful for us. If you are the operator of a web site, please consider using our widget on your own web site.
We write blog posts about trends which we see in our data and are trying to build our profile via... more

There is no other real-time, up-to-date resource on what sites and searches are blocked in China. Our aim is to be the leading destination for information of this kind and our goal is to bring transparency to online censorship in China.

The Great Firewall of China resets connections of web requests that contain certain censored keywords. The screenshot above shows an example of a Google search which resulted in the connection being reset. Once a censored keyword has generated a connection reset state, it often blocks any traffic to the given website for a period of time.

DNS means Domain Name System. It's the global system which converts domain names (eg domain.com) into IP addresses (eg 1.2.3.4). DNS Poisoning refers to the intentional manipulation of this system such that a domain name does not resolve to a correct IP address. When in place, the website will be unavailable or redirect to a different website.
There are legitimate reasons why a DNS lookup may return different IPs depending on the country where the request comes from. For this reason, one can... more

The most famous example of this form of censorship is Skype. Whenever skype.com is accessed from China, it redirects to skype.tom.com. Tom.com is Skype's local partner in China. The product offered by Tom is visually very similar to the original Skype and the user is not informed of the redirection. However, Tom Skype is subject to Chinese regulations meaning that all personal data, calls and chats are filtered, centrally stored and open to government surveillance.
Our system concludes that a website... more

All websites hosted in China are required to exercise self-censorship. This takes many forms and is more complex to track than censorship of foreign websites. Some websites admit to self-censorship by displaying a certain message when searching for certain keywords. One example is Baidu, as shown above, which presents the following message for particularly sensitive searches:根据相关法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。This roughly translates to:In accordance with relevant... more

This form of censorship means that the web request is manipulated by the Great Firewall of China such that it loads indefinitely without a response. The browser gives up after a period of time and displays a message such as "The connection has timed out". Without access to circumvention tools, it's not possible to distinguish between this form of censorship and server problems. As a result, many users may interpret the message as a technical problem caused by the website itself.
Our system... more

We started collecting data about the Great Firewall of China in February, 2011, and launched a web site making this information public under the name GreatFirewall.biz. We changed our name to GreatFire.org in October, 2011. We have continued to add information about blocked searches and web sites and are constantly trying to improve our data. Initially we only covered a few hundred web sites but now we monitor over 10,000 urls.

Our data comes from the following sources:
1. User additions. Anyone can add a new URL for testing and it will be continuously tested by our system.
2. Collaboration with other projects. Any URL that's marked as blocked in China by these sources is automatically imported into our system: Autoproxy, China Digital Times and Herdict. Each keyword in our system - be it on on Baidu, Google, Weibo or Wikipedia - corresponds to a URL on that website which is tested for censorship similarly to how any other URL is tested. These keywords are mainly added by users. China... more

Due to the sensitive nature of the content on our web sites we prefer to remain anonymous at this point. You can, however, contact us on info at greatfire dot org or via @GreatFireChina on Twitter.

Comments

Submitted by WE Holdings Ltd on Thu, Jul 19, 2012

Hi Sir/Miss, I just did url test in your website and found that our website (www.wes.sg) is 100% blocked in China. Can i know why it has blocked and what should we do to make it unblock? Thanks a lot.

Submitted by percy on Mon, Jul 30, 2012

This is because your IP 216.12.210.86 is blocked in China. Your new IP 216.12.210.66 is not blocked and so your website works fine

Submitted by Anonim on Tue, Nov 13, 2012

Facking china democracy

Submitted by Fee on Tue, Dec 11, 2012

Your test says that pinterest is not blocked, but it's redirecting to a Chinese search engine (either www.sogou.cn or o66.cn). Only been for the last 12 hours or so. And the captcha's not working on images...

Submitted by queshon on Sat, Dec 22, 2012

what is the difference between blocked and restricted?

Submitted by Paulette on Tue, Sep 17, 2013

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your site, how can i subscribe for a blog site?

The account helped me a applicable deal. I were tiny bit familiar
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I am currently posting your and theFreeWeibo.org name on Weibo, will anyone in China be able to read it?

Submitted by alean on Fri, Feb 14, 2014

I wonder for what government this website is acting? Censorship in China is a particular object of maintaining stability and in order to develop its economic growth because of its historical and cultural features. it is indeed a developing country (so everything could not be perfect and can be perfect right now) with a very diverse cultural, religious and ethnic diversity (a billion and a half people!), but also because of its recent communist chapter. All countries in the world seeks to cultivate patriotism and stability in order to enrich and avoid the risk of civil war - can lead to an internal implosion and human massacres. Is this is what you want for China? and why do not you monitor the U.S.?

Submitted by tian'anmen square on Mon, Mar 31, 2014

To alean:

Do you seriously believe the combination of censorship and one-party rule is the formula for stability longer term? I feel sorry for all Chinese for not having the freedom to speak our mind and having to accept lying as part of everyday life. Is this kind of "stable" life the best Chinese people can hope for?

Submitted by question on Tue, Apr 01, 2014

Do you have open API or any other way I can use to download the uncensored data for research purpose?

Greatly appreciate what you did! really a good job!

Submitted by question on Tue, Apr 01, 2014

Do you have open API or any other way I can use to download the uncensored data for research purpose?

Greatly appreciate what you did! really a good job!

Submitted by 来自中国 on Thu, Apr 10, 2014

当然,我是翻墙来这里的.

希望这个网站能从技术上推动民主

Submitted by 来自中国 on Thu, Apr 10, 2014

当然,我是翻墙来这里的.

希望这个网站能从技术上推动民主

Submitted by 来自中国 on Thu, Apr 10, 2014

当然,我是翻墙来这里的.

希望这个网站能从技术上推动民主

Submitted by carpinteyrooys on Sat, Jun 07, 2014

If you notice that your nail polish is becoming thick in the bottle or sticky, just add some acetone, or nail polish remover, into the bottle. Put a small amount of remover into the nail polish bottle, and shake. You can usually get about two more applications out of the bottle by using this technique.

Submitted by art on Wed, Nov 05, 2014

cook

Submitted by Amulet on Wed, Nov 19, 2014

Hi there.
I've just found my website www.amuletbhutan.com is 100% blocked. Is there any functionality on this site to that may be able to explain a reason for this?

Submitted by Natalia on Tue, Nov 25, 2014

HI! i performed the test on a web i created and i got a 50% blocked result. In the details i got the following data: "28 (CURLE_OPERATION_TIMEDOUT)".
What does it mean? Can i fix that?
Could you please tell me more about this? the url is http;//www.raulpardeilhan.com
Thank u very much!